Paternalistic Attitude in Post-Socialist and West-European Societies

The work is devoted to the study of paternalistic attitudes in post-communist countries and countries of Western Europe. The main concepts in the study are political paternalism and paternalistic attitudes. Political paternalism is conceptualized as state protection and guardianship of citizens. Paternalistic attitudes – as a conviction of the need for a strong leader, the expectation of state protection by the citizens, support for the existing regime, including the unspoken (in the form of absenteeism) in exchange for transferring full power to the state. According to the modernization theory of R.Inglhart, which divides values into survival values and self-expression values and connects them with different types of political structure and level of economic development, paternalistic attitudes appear as a component of survival values and are characteristic of non-democratic government. The main hypotheses of the research are put forward on that basis. The paper presents the results of the analysis based on the secondary data of the European Social Survey for 2016. The study used methods of descriptive statistics, factor analysis and univariate analysis.